Tag Archives: politics

The Violence of the Left

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From coast to coast, demonstrators are burning flags and effigies of the president-elect while declaring that they refuse to accept Trump’s victory. But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes—a telltale sign of coordination.

And

Others claimed to have found ads posted on CraigsList in which a Seattle-based non-profit was soliciting “Full-Time Activists.”

“We are looking for motivated individuals who are seeking Full-Time, Part-Time, and Permanent positions,” reads a line from the ad from Washington CAN! posted on Wednesday.

Is this the hatred of the Left, too?  Carefully organized?

The Bias of Journalists and Journalism

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Howard Kurtz, that self-styled bastion of journalistic criticism who writes for Fox News has a piece out about a Trump-hostile media and “some pundits admitting they blew it.”

After producing a litany of…mistakes…made by newspapers and pseudo-journalists as they produced their erroneous analyses and predictions, though, this is all that Kurtz could conclude:

[W]e somehow decided that we knew what was best for them.

Kurtz is missing the point.  His fellow pseudo-journalists didn’t miss their predictions because they misunderstood or blew off mainstream Americans—Americans outside their New York and West Coast bubble—or because they thought they knew what was best for us.  That’s a symptom, not a cause.  His fellow pseudo-journalists misunderstood and blew us off because they’re too biased to see the truth.

And so Kurtz exposes his own bias.

I suggest that the era of the NLMSM is past.  It’s time for ordinary Americans to go elsewhere for our news and other information.  It’s time for us to use our own judgment in evaluating that news and information.

The print and broadcast sources have shown they cannot be trusted; their output has no reliable value.  Their output, at bottom, is no different than the entertainment fluff published by the National Enquirers or the Globes or the Stars of the entertainment industry.  Kurtz and his ilk just take themselves more seriously.

Loosening Financial Regulations

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Felix Hufeld, President of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, is worried about an outcome of Donald Trump’s election.  He’s concerned that financial regulations laid on in the aftermath of the Panic of 2008, regulations that expanded the reach of Government into men’s financial lives, will begin to be loosened during a Trump administration.

Barely 10 years after the start of the financial crisis I once more hear the bugle calls of deregulation.

And I have the impression that these sounds are becoming louder.  That is not without risk.

To live life is to live with risk.  The thing about risk, though, is that the more Government tries to mandate rules against it, the more Government increases the risks that ordinary folks must live with.

Hufeld has this much right, though:

The [financial] industry, just as politics and regulators, are in need of predictability and continuity—not regulatory volatility[.]

Indeed.  Regulations need to be vastly reduced, Government gotten out of the way of free markets and the free citizens operating in them.  And then politicians and regulators need to leave the remainder alone and stable and not constantly be adding regulations and “tweaking” others.

The problem Hufeld and other bureaucrats of the Left—both in Europe and in the US—have is that they can’t conceive the idea the ordinary citizens are fully capable of making their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or these bureaucrats worry about their own loss of power were ordinary folks freed to make their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or both.

The Left’s Blatant Bigotry

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…continues.  A couple of examples illustrate the shame.

Here’s Jamelle Bouie, political writer for Slate in a tweet:

I didn’t quite understand how much white people hated us, or could at least live with that hate. Now I do.

He went on:

Donald Trump did what Romney and McCain wouldn’t do. He all but cried “nigger.” And it worked.

Because “white people” disagreed with this black man.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC:

I’m thinking about President Obama too. I mean, to have the first African American President succeeded by a guy who was endorsed by the KKK…it’s a big deal.

It’s also a big deal that Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the California branch of the KKK, and she quietly accepted that endorsement, while Trump rejected the KKK endorsement of him.  Maddow carefully elided that news item.

And Jeff Jarvis, Professor, Director of Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at City University of New York:

I fear that journalism is irredeemably broken, a failure. My profession failed to inform the public about the fascist they are electing.

He’s right about journalism being broken.  It’s broken and untrustworthy for the blatant bias and deliberate mischaracterization he demonstrated in that second sentence.

Because those he’s decided are “uneducated and uninformed” are that because they disagree with this “journalist.”

Even Fox News‘ bastion of media criticism, Howard Kurtz, can’t bring himself to recognize this sewage as anything more than unattractive vitriol.

And then there are the Left’s rank and file, the equivalent of what no less a light than President Barack Obama has disparaged as bitter Bible-clinging, gun-toting denizens of flyover country.

Thousands of people coast-to-coast took to the streets Wednesday night to protest Donald Trump’s election, disrupting traffic, chanting anti-Trump slogans and some ending up in handcuffs.

From New England to heartland cities like Kansas City and along the West Coast, demonstrators bore flags and effigies of the president-elect, disrupting traffic and declaring that they refused to accept Trump’s victory.

These were far more than protestors, though, Fox News‘ decision to minimize their behavior as protests notwithstanding.  These were vandals who damaged private property, burned the American flag, lit fires in street intersections, shut down highways.

Because these toddlers didn’t get their way last Tuesday.

So much for binding up the wounds and coming together for the good of the nation after the election, as the Left’s own champions, Clinton and President Barack Obama, called for.  The bigots of the Left will never give up their divisiveness.  In a very Locke-ian sense, they’ve created themselves as outlaws.

The rest of the Left, hopefully the large majority of the Left, need publicly to disown these bigots among them, to separate themselves from this still too-active detritus of the Democratic Party’s past.

Freedom’s Just Another Word

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…as far as the PRC is concerned.

The good citizens of Hong Kong had elections for their representatives in the city-state’s Legislative Council, and two folks who participated in protests two years ago against PRC intrusion into Hong Kong government affairs were elected.

Never mind the voice of the people.  They have none wherever the PRC can reach.

The Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress said people elected to the city’s legislature cannot retake their oaths of office if their first attempt was invalidated for being insincere, not solemn, or deliberately misread.

Naturally, the ones who decide whether an attempt was insincere, not solemn, or deliberately misread are those of the PRC’s government and their puppets allies in the Legislative Council.  And so, Yau Wai-ching and Sixtus Leung are being barred—by the PRC—from taking their oaths of office, after their first attempt was blocked by the Council’s leadership because the two were too lippy to suit them, and before a Hong Kong court could adjudicate the matter.

So much for freedom in PRC satraps.  So much for the PRC’s commitment vis-à-vis Hong Kong, made as part of Great Britain’s handover of Hong Kong.